Bloatware Installed By Dell and Impact on Gaming

HardOCP has a review of the Dell XPS 400 that goes into considerable detail of the problems they had installing and running games and getting decent benchmarks as a result of all the "extras" installed by Dell.

This may be of interest to laptop owners also for the software issues discussed.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0

The Bottom Line 4/10

On Dells Web site, the XPS series is marketed directly to gamers and high-performance power users. The XPS series is under the gaming tag, and they claim right on the front page of the Dell.com site that, We take your gaming experience as seriously as you do.

The next line: XPS show just how serious we are is more telling. If the Dimension XPS400 is any indication, Dell considers computer gamers a joke.

Harsh, yes. But we think its accurate. The system itself is a decent gaming platform and the hardware was well built. It was put together decently with parts that can pull the weight required to play todays graphically intensive games.

But we couldnt even install one of the most popular games on the market, Sims 2, and trying to play other popular games would lock up the system and gaming sessions, when they would run, would get interrupted.

The pre-installed programs that Dell chose to include on its computer were almost certainly the cause of all these problems, and unloading these programs from the boot-up routine fixed the problems.

Because Dell is a large company that sells many identical systems, and because their restore solution uses a hidden partition with a disk image on it anyway, this leads us to believe that Dell uses a disk image, loaded via network or CD-ROM, to set up the software on its computers.

Now, if you were the largest PC retailer in North America, you might make sure that the disc image youre loading on the many, many computers you are selling has a configuration that works properly with the computers you sell. This, to me, would include at least a moderate amount of in-house game testing.

The fact that our very popular, mainstream games wouldnt work on what Dell markets as its gaming line leads us to believe that they simply didnt test this configuration extensively, and certainly not by trying to run Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Quake 4, or The Sims 2.

Furthermore, the fact that the video card driver they used was more than two months out of date also implies to me that it has been at least that long since they last looked at the configuration.

It comes down to this: Most people who buy a computer from Dell instead of a lesser-known builder do so specifically because they just want something that works out of the box, and the Dell XPS 400 doesnt.

Our experience with the Dell, overall, was unpleasant and unsatisfactory. We cannot with good conscience recommend this computer to anyone.

Our goal is this evaluation, and all our other product evaluations, is to give consumers the ability to make informed choices. As a side effect of that, we hope that computer companies will also take this information to make their products better. We think that Dell can, if it chooses, rise to the challenge of improving their product line. We look forward to evaluating other Dell products in the future.

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